Decatur, Ga., February 28, 2017 – The Decatur Writers Studio (DWS), a writing community and studio space created by the AJC Decatur Book Festival, will host its first writing camps for pre-teens and teens this summer. Terra Elan McVoy, author of eight novels and a writing instructor who travels around the country to teach creative writing, will lead both camps. One camp is designed for students entering 6th-8th grades in the fall and one is geared to rising 9th-11th graders. Students who apply and gain acceptance into these day camps will attend classes on the campus of Agnes Scott College.

“These new summer camps complete our vision of offering three levels of writing instruction to our community,” said Suzanne Van Atten, director of Decatur Writers Studio. “Our six-week workshops offer intensives in the craft of writing, our Saturday Seminars offer insights into the business of writing and the summer camps inspire and educate younger writers.”

Enrollment is now open online at DecaturWritersStudio.com. Each camp is limited to 12 students, so DWS anticipates the camps will fill up quickly. Details of the two DWS summer writing camps follow:

This is an all-day summer camp for middle schoolers who love to write or want to give writing a try. Campers will learn the basic building blocks of storytelling, play with story-starting ideas, develop characters, explore setting, build their descriptive writing muscles and even dabble in some poetry. Whether students have written tons already, or just have a tiny glimmer of an idea, they are welcome if they are willing to experiment, explore, and share their creative writing skills.

This camp is perfect for the student who has ideas but not the time to work on them, or who has ideas but can’t keep up with the momentum to write them. Also welcome are students who want to develop their characters more fully, work on setting and dialogue, strengthen their powers of description and plotting, get feedback on their work, be inspired by other writers like themselves and generally immerse themselves in a whole week of nothing but writing. This camp will be fiction-centric, though it will touch on elements of poetry to infuse prose with dynamic language, and is open to experienced teen writers and first-timers alike.

About the Instructor: Terra Elan McVoy is the author of six young adult novels published by Simon Pulse (an imprint of Simon & Schuster) and two books for middle grades readers published by Katherine Tegan Books (an imprint of HarperCollins). Her novel Criminal was a 2014 Edgar Award finalist for Best Young Adult Mystery. McVoy has held a variety of jobs centered around reading and writing, from managing operations and selling books at Decatur’s independent children’s bookstore, Little Shop of Stories, to teaching writing classes at the Yale University Writers’ Conference and Smith College. She has been a part of every AJC Decatur Book Festival and served as the festival’s program director from 2011-2012. She holds a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from St. Andrews Presbyterian College and earned her M.A. from Florida State University’s creative writing program. To learn more about McVoy, visit TerraElan.com and follow her on Twitter at @TerraMcVoy.

About Decatur Writers Studio: Founded in 2016, the mission of the Decatur Writers Studio (DWS) is to provide aspiring and established writers in metro Atlanta with a place to work and grow. In partnership with Decatur CoWorks, DWS provides a limited number of memberships to writers who seek space for their endeavors. DWS also offers writing workshops to the general public, hosted at the Decatur CoWorks space throughout the year. To learn more about DWS membership and to view a dynamic calendar of writing courses, visit DecaturWritersStudio.com.